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Do you use your brand in your title? Is copying your brand too? If so, he's shooting himself in the foot. If not, there isn't much you can do to address the title specifically, but there are some other things you can do to make your result more desirable to click. .

Don't change your title if you believe it's the best title for your business. If you aren't using your brand in the title, this could help users with confusion. Also, if he's copying your title, make sure to beat him out in the meta description to siphon off more click-throughs. Also look into the kinds of rich snippets you might be able to put in there to make your result stand out while you work on over taking him.

This title won't have negative repercussions for you from an SEO standpoint. I usually just smile when I see something like this happen. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

Yelp and Google My Business are musts for just about any industry, but after that, the priority changes depending on the industry. Industry-specific directories can play a significant part.

Here is a great guide where priority is broken down by industry: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category

WMT measures clicks from Google. This data is gathered directly from Google's properties before the visitor sees your website. On the other hand, GA measures traffic based on a script on your website that has to fire and send data back to Google. If this script doesn't fire, no data goes to Google.

There are multiple reasons why this script may not fire, including mistakes during implementation, someone leaving the page before the script loads, browsers that don't load javascript, security programs that block the code from firing, and so on. All of those factors can attribute to variations in data.

I think it's good to use both sources. When you're in a data-driven industry, it's good to collect lots of it

Here is a post that goes a little deeper, the comments are especially intriguing: http://www.notprovided.eu/why-not-use-googles-wmt-data/

There is a saying that I think holds particularly true in our industry: "If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur."

This is one of those "you get what you pay for" moments. Spend what you can afford, but keep in mind that there's a reason why certain SEOs charge more than others. It's because they can, due to proven results and demand for their services.

All you can do is know your budget, shop around, ask questions to be perfectly clear on the services they are providing, and then make a decision on who you want to go with. Sorry I can't provide you with specific companies, but each situation is different and requires a different set of skills. Make sure to inquire when shopping around as to whether the companies have specific experience with your kind of site and what you need looked into.

They absolutely need to removed as quickly as possible. You are in the right and that company is just doing what companies do and protecting themselves. If the articles on MOZ aren't enough to convince your client, here's one from Forbes... maybe he'll listen to that one: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2013/10/09/seo-rankings-tanking-check-for-bad-incoming-links/

A large portion of my job with new clients is now link cleanup and disavows, because they suffered this kind of penalty with who was doing their marketing before us.

I'm a fan of the third one, personally. It looks like you know the terms you want to use, so if they can fit in the title naturally, the only thing that matters it which one sounds better and will get the best click through rate. In this case, "free outdoor Shakespeare" seems like it would get a bigger draw from people who saw the title, so putting that up front would be best for users.

You may not be shooting yourself in the foot with the first one from an SEO perspective, but from a CTR perspective you might be.

Which niche you decide to target on your home page is up to you, but in general, the better user experience leans towards broader terms. You can focus deeper on internal pages, but be welcoming to a large crowd (an important, more general key phrase) on your homepage.

Why I say it's up to you, is because it's important to know the risk vs. reward, there is no definite answer. Going too broad will have you fighting against giants you can't yet compete with. Focusing too narrow will limit your demographic scope and traffic. As the SEO, it's up to you to do the research and discuss the levels of risk and reward with your client. What will take longer, what kind of results can they expect from each, etc.

It can. Ideally, the same phone number will always be displayed, but in your case (and a few of my clients), dynamic call tracking really needs to be on the site.

There are solutions to this. I don't know which software you're using, and it could differ depending on the software. The solution we found that worked was to put the call tracking script in, and have it change the phone number on the website only when traffic is coming in with certain parameters.

This works well with PPC call tracking, because the traffic coming in has predictable parameters, and those can used as a trigger to fire the script. Search engines aren't going to use these parameters, so they won't effect local SEO. Depending on how much direct and referral traffic you have, you might be able to use this solution with your PPC pool of numbers, and then you can focus on separating the referral and direct traffic from the SEO traffic to get the data you need. We usually only split the PPC traffic this way, trying to do it with organic could get you into trouble.

This should do it:

#begin redirect

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.domain.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/subfolder/$1 [R=301]

#end redirect

Regex isn't the most intuitive thing in the world, but it's a necessary evil sometimes. Here's a nice little tool to help when you have to use it: http://regex101.com/

Imagine you are a user. If you're searching the singular, you're probably looking for a SERP with websites of single venue locations to browse through. If you were searching the plural, you're probably looking for websites that aggregate, list, rank or otherwise provide you with a predetermined group of venues. So, if you are a single venue trying to rank for "venues" you're always going to struggle against those sites that naturally use the plural.

With that said, yes, optimizing for a singular will usually give you some juice for the plural as well, but not as much. If you're starting from scratch, I would recommend going for the lower competition, more relevant key term first.

And remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more results. Targeting keywords without the proper searcher intent is going to get you traffic that doesn't convert.

Why block the pages in robots.txt after the redirects? That seems counter productive: you want Google to see that the pages are being redirected, but you are preventing Google from looking at the redirected page.

Remove the robots.txt block and you should be okay. Also, just for fun, confirm that they are 301 redirects and not 302s, but my money is on the robots.txt.

Four months is too long after a migration to not see a recovery.

Not directly, since Twitter links are nofollowed, but it could help indirectly if you are promoting good content that viewers may want to share and link to after reading.

This shouldn't be an issue. One of the benefits of authorship is it can be used across multiple sites to attribute posts. If you are attributing different posts on different sites, that's fine, and sharing those posts on your G+ is even better. It sounds like you're using authorship as it was intended.

If he didn't know what he was talking about when he said he was doing white hat, I doubt he knows when he's doing black hat-wise.

What he's referring to is most likely a blog comment or forum blast. If your website is relatively established, this isn't likely to have an effect on you.

You can monitor your links through Google Webmasters, and if you see sudden spikes in links, start actively disavowing those links or hire a more trustworthy SEO to do that job. I would recommend someone with references, examples, and local (or at least a native English speaker, it's tough to create good content in a language you don't know well).

Just disavow. Don't let people like this extort you. If you want to get him to try and remove the links for free, tell him you're not going to pay him, and instead you're going to submit a disavow, flagging his entire network to Google as unwanted links. You made a good faith effort by contacting the webmaster, but being extorted goes beyond good faith.

This is not a good approach. Instead of 500 different domains, it sounds like those domains should probably just be pages or paragraphs on a single domain. You're effectively splitting your link juice 500 ways by trying to get ranked for 500 different domains.

It's impossible for you to take the time and effort on each domain, so the entire campaign will suffer. Instead focus on a single domain, and build that up to cover the areas you want to.

Google knows all about people who try to game the system by buying a bunch of domains. Not only is this a bad approach, it can leads to Google being very unhappy with your brand.

If you know for sure they are all bad links, then do it all at once and get it done with. Maybe you'll see an increase in traffic.

Once you disavow something, you're not likely to get it back, so keep that in mind. From the sounds of it, these links are obviously bad, so you shouldn't have to worry.

I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet

Yes. Unless you've noticed that a couple of those domains have gained traction. Then you can redirect a couple, but not all 500.

Yes, your meta description should focus 100% on getting the users to click on your result, because it convinces them it's what they're searching for.

Google doesn't use meta description as a ranking factor, so there's no worry there. Just make sure to stay within the allotted character amount of around 156.

This issue isn't duplicate content, Moz is just flagging it as that because of the severe lack of content, making the footer, sidebar, etc. the majority of the content on the page. This is not good, and the best way to remedy it would be to build out more content.

I realize with roughly 14k pages, this isn't realistic to do for every single page, but you could prioritize. What are your most popular products? Start with those and build out content to make sure they rank and perform as well as possible, and then continue to go down the list as you have time to do so, manually optimizing and building out the most profitable/popular pages first.

When it comes to unique content, there is no automated solution. Either you write stuff, hire someone else to write stuff, or do what a lot of places do: implements a review system for customers to use and crowd-source the unique content that way.

Agreed, if you're doing it, don't rely on it to increase your website's PageRank, but powerful citations on those reputable directories can help with Maps and getting some targeted traffic.

It's pretty current. They released it a couple of months ago. It's a great learning tool and is still applicable.

It sounds like your client needs to be educated on how proper link building works. You can't just say, "I need good backlinks, and I need them NOW!"

In order to build good, relevant, safe backlinks, you need to create assets or other ways to attract people to share your content and build links naturally. This takes time and planning. There are quicker grey/black hat ways to build links, but this puts your client's site at risk, and your client needs to know that.

Moz recently came out with a good beginner's guide to link building. Perhaps you can pull some tidbits from that to help your client understand why his/her request is unreasonable. http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building

I don't think you or they would want to throw away the effort they already put in, assuming it's quality, unique content. 301 the old pages, and move the content over to the new site. That way, if there is any juice, it'll be transferred, but even if there isn't, people may find those posts useful, and this way you don't risk a duplicate content penalty.

It never hurts to do a little keyword research and do some optimization for blog posts, just don't go overboard and force keywords into a blog post for ranking's sake. As long as it's natural in the writing or headlines, it's almost always good to target larger groups of the traffic you want, as opposed to smaller or non-existent groups.

The Schema markup is all you need. I've never had to do anything else besides that, and Google usually indexes the rich snippet within a couple weeks.

You can alter your titles and see if that helps, but in the end it's a matter of seeing how Google is changing your titles and then creating a title that's a compromise between what you want and what Google wants. And even in the that case, Google might not listen.

Hi Nick,

A couple things here, but first and foremost: a good, honest, white hat, non-sleezy SEO will tell you every single thing they are doing. About 15% to 20% of my job is explaining my actions to my clients, which can be frustrating sometimes, but is also necessary. My mindset is that it's important for my clients to not only understand what I am doing with their website, but also for them to get behind it 100%.

Let's be clear about one thing: there is no such thing as a "trade secret" in SEO. There is nothing that, once you know it, you can just exploit it and charge business owners to do that one thing. Every account is unique and requires a different approach. If a company won't tell you what they're going to do, don't use them. The same way I wouldn't buy a car unless the dealer told me which one I was getting.

Also, giving out free stays for blog posts/links is walking a fine line on Google's guidelines and some SEOs will say it's straight up buying links. Be aware that this is a somewhat risky strategy.

It sounds like you have a good amount of content and social presence, so it looks like the first thing you'd want to do is figure how to best utilize those two things together in a content distribution strategy. If you can get you good content to the right audience, links will "naturally" come in without needing to target them with free stays.

Make sure not to ignore potential on-page issues or possible penalties incurred as well. Moz is a great tool to help with the on-page stuff, and this might give you an indication of a deeper penalty issue: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.

I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.

Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.

With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.

When I have multiple listings under the same brand like that, I think it's good to add something descriptive at the end.

For example, if you have a brand with 10 locations in 10 cities, then you can make them +BrandLosAngeles, +BrandNewYork, etc.

The URLs are there to make for a better user experience, so adding a number to end of the brand doesn't really help much. Instead, think of a word or two that is memorable, and that makes sense to those who might see it.

When you say "Tab" I take it you mean the anchor text of the homepage link in the navigation. If that's the case, I think keeping it as "Home" is just fine. The additional keyword specific anchor text juice you get from that change doesn't outweigh user experience. People know and expect there to be a "Home" type button. Changing it may confuse people when they don't need to be.

Some SEOs say not to disavow until you know you're hit with a penalty, but I like being proactive.

These links are definitely spammy. These are the kinds of links that take down websites, and when I get a new client with a lot of this kind of stuff, I'll submit a proactive disavow report.

Recovering from a link spam penalty isn't exactly the easiest or fastest thing in the world, so making sure it never gets to that point is important.

ColeLusby is right. Prices vary greatly depending on a lot of factors on your side and on the client's side.

For you: your talent level, experience, and what you think your time is worth all come into play

For the client: his/her industry, project scope, kind of website, and what they can contribute to the campaign should be considered.

Only you can know the answer to this.

Usually these are at root.com/geositemap.xml and then root.com/location.kml or locations.kml, so punch those in first and see if anything comes up.

Google doesn't index these things, so a site-specific query isn't going to do much for you.

In the end, does it really matter if they do or not? Would your strategy change if a competitor had a KML? Off the top of my head, I can't think of an instance where that would be the case.

Hi Enam,

Your questions are answered below, but there is a larger issue here. Buying 50 domains to redirect for SEO value will not hurt you, but it will also not help you in the slightest. None of those domains have any juice to give, and they aren't doing anything for you, good or bad. There are reasons to do this sort of thing (branding), but not for SEO. Also, PLEASE SEE ANSWER "C" BELOW.

A. No.

B. No.

C. Location forwarding, for the love of all that is holy. Right now you are masking your website with 50 different domains.

Consistency is key. I would leave the 4+ off. From my experience and from talking with Google employees, the more identical the better for the actual NAP. A Googler who works in that area told me even the difference between "blvd" and "boulevard" can possibly have an impact.

And when it comes down to, "Who do I make happy, Bing or Google?" The answer is almost always Google.

We've never had an issue. We test tag manager in our dev sites, they don't get indexed, but the tags will still fire.

In Webmaster Tools you can see if there are any manual action penalties. Just because there are none there doesn't mean the site isn't penalized, but if there is something there, then it's time to take action right away.

This little tool can help indicate as well if you don't see a manual action, but without historical data like analytics and ranking reports, it becomes more difficult: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

This looks extremely spammy to Google. It makes for a bad user experience, since you're trying to trick the user into believing they are going to one site, when they're actually at another. Even if this isn't your intent, Google doesn't like it. Not a guaranteed penalty, but a way this set up could possibly hurt you.

You won't get any value SEO-wise, any keyword indicators the domains may have directed to your site should already be on your pages anyway (if freshly bought domains being 301'd were indicators in the first place).

My suggestion is to not add the geos. It's all well and good that the offline world might refer to it with the geo and you might not technically be going against guidelines, but it's still not something you want to risk getting flagged for, or have reps change without your knowledge, screwing up your citations. Then you'll find yourself on with the phone reps all the time trying to tell them how your situation is an exception.

I've never done this specific rule, but it would definitely be a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file in your root. You can give this piece a shot:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]

Jeez.... how do I get rid of all the extra spacing?!

Anyway, if that doesn't work, there are some other options here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url

And if you need to customize the regex a bit, this can help: http://www.regexr.com/

Try to be more descriptive than that in the alt tags. Quickly describe what the image is about. You never want to duplicate alt tags on different images, because those images are not the same. Alt tags are there to describe the image in a short, concise way.

I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.

Hi Chris,

You have been misinformed. Disavow is your friend when done correctly. If you know you took a hit for bad backlinks, you can recover. This comes from personal experience of fixing this issue. You are usually talking about 1-2 month recovery period when link cleanup is done right.

If you like your brand, domain, and you were ranking before a link penalty, then clean it up. Should be cheaper than a new website as well.

This would be like any other site transfer. Do page-level redirects, expect a dip in traffic after you make the switch, and then monitor to see how well you recover and then determine what other action you need to take based on that information.

Here's an in-depth post that can help you out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Yes, however, implementing canonical tags in the posts on one of the properties will resolve this issue.

Here's a post to help you out with implementation: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

In general, I find it's always better to consolidate and build a nice big authority under one domain. In your case, it'll take some analysis of how those 10 sites are already performing. If they are well-built and already established, it may be better to keep them. If not, create pages on your one domain for them, redirect the old sites, and create listings for each one, pointing to the landing page for the property. This is, in general, the better route I've found 9 times out of 10... and now-a-days maybe more like 99 times out of 100. Especially in real estate, which is a very competitive market.

It's usually a few weeks, but there are factors that can make that longer or shorter.